^{Originally posted by ghamerly January 24, 2026}
reveal.js works well with highlight.js (on its own), but when pandoc generates revealjs slides, it is not possible (as far as I can see) to simply integrate highlight.js. There are two reasons:

1. pandoc generates <pre [attributes]><code>..., but highlight.js expects <pre><code [attributes]>...
2. the revealjs template needs some minor additions - in particular to add initialization for RevealHighlight plugin in Reveal.initialize(.

I've made a miniature working demo that enables pandoc to generate revealjs slides that seem to work well with highlight.js. I'm sure something I did could be simpler, but it boils down to:

• a Lua filter to put attributes on the "correct" HTML tags
• a slightly modified revealjs template

Here's the demo. Feedback is welcome. I'm going to try to use this in my teaching workflow.
https://github.com/ghamerly/pandoc-revealjs-highlightjs